by Don Hall

As a music major in college, I was subjected to two years of music theory. The first thing I remember was my professor explaining that the canon of Johann Sebastian Bach was the basis of all music theory in the Western world. Everything that came later was a response to Bach. It didn’t matter if you liked Bach’s music anymore than it mattered if you liked Pythagoras or Isaac Newton. Baseline is baseline.

We studied everything the man wrote. Concepts of harmony, melody, structure and form, consonance and dissonance all came from Bach. Even when we as young, contrary students tried to contradict Bach, there was yet another example of how this organ master from Germany who sired almost two dozen kids (a few were illegitimate which was scandalous but not germaine to his music) answered our attempts to find a flaw in the overwhelming foundation of music as we knew it with a posthumous rebuttal.

I also played my trumpet in a number of orchestras, brass quintets, and jazz ensembles. The larger the orchestra the more strict was the hierarchy in place. Competing for chair placement, anxiously hoping to please the conductor in a way that made you stand out but not too much, and navigating the same social nonsense of people just out of high school was as challenging as scale work and working on the Hummel Concerto for twelve hours a day until my lips were swollen like a Real Housewife’s on Botox.

There were bullies but they were nerd bullies. Nerd bullies are the worst because instead of going outside and being beaten down, one had to endure the psychological and academic bullying of those whose currency was intellectual prowess rather than physical strength. A guy beats you up in the parking lot and it’s over. A guy challenges you to a chair duel playing arpeggios is far more arbitrary and is never over.

The world of orchestra is a tiny world filled with petty disputes that most people living in the larger society would find silly. In that tiny microcosm, however, each contention was taken deadly seriously.

When I graduated and headed to Chicago, I played in several pit orchestras as well as subbed in for smaller but still vital chamber orchestras around town. Then I discovered improvised comedy and sketch. I discovered Second City. The rules of the nerd bullying was nearly identical, the scope of the footprint equally as minuscule. Artists can be the shittiest sort.

There was also, like the orchestra community, a lot of sex. Hooking up was almost as crucial as being funny onstage or writing a killer blackout. Nerds humping nerds, improv dudes getting a gander at that one hot chick who was sort of funny but mostly hot. Girlfriends getting promoted to instructor status with little to no skill at teaching but, hey, she’s sleeping with the head of the program, right?

My joke at the time was that in the five levels of classes at Second City, you would get as teachers one burned out comedian, one legit genius, one screenwriter, somebody’s girlfriend, and a guy who’s been teaching there since the 50’s. Everyone knew which teachers slept with their students. The only women who complained were the ones who banged some middle-aged has-been hoping to get a place on a team or a teaching assignment but was passed over for someone more savvy.

Brian Posen was one of those teachers. A dumpy but charismatic guy, Posen had a reputation for skeeving on any and every remotely thin female improviser in town. The stories permeated rehearsals across the city. He was hugely successful, came from serious money, and when the Theatre Building Chicago closed its doors, he bought the building, called it Stage 773 and started Sketchfest.

Then his sexual escapades came to haunt him.

“Chicago comedy figure and Sketchfest founder Brian Posen has announced he is “stepping down as Creative Director of Stage 773” after a decade at the helm of the Lakeview performance venue.

Posen made the announcement Friday in a Facebook post, making it his second departure from a high-profile post in recent months. In March, Second City confirmed that Posen was dismissed as the head of the improv program at the Second City Training Center. He left the Chicago comedy institution, where he had taught since 1993, amid allegations of inappropriate behavior toward female students, the Tribune has learned.”

SOURCE

For Brian, sex was just a part of the job. He was successful, funny, and had power in an insular community. Why not take advantage of the obvious perk of young women looking to make it in Chicago willing to give a chunky mogul a blowjob in the green room? His was not the onstage brutality of Darrell Cox at Profiles Theater nor was it the nepotism of Charna Halpern over at ImprovOlympic, but he had to pay for all those trysts and he did. He was canceled before there was even a term for it.

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I wanted to see Cate Blanchette in Todd Fields’ ‌TÁR the second I heard about it but I was in Kansas and the movie played in Wichita for exactly one weekend for three showings. Waiting for the streaming rental to go down from $20 to a more reasonable number, I heard the rumblings. Apparently a lot of people thought she was an actual person and tried to cancel her until they found out that she is a fictional character. Then they tried to cancel the film.

Written and directed by the Oscar-nominated Todd Field (whose past works include 2001's In the Bedroom and 2006's Little Children), TÁR chronicles the downfall of world-famous composer and conductor Lydia Tár as she prepares to complete a Mahler cycle of recordings with the Berlin Symphony and the infamous Mahler 5. As portrayed by Blanchette, Lydia is brilliant, brutal, loving, and has the same tendency as Brian Posen. She is, as she describes in one scene a “U-Haul lesbian” and the subjects of her sexual misdeeds are represented by an offscreen presence, a young woman who she possibly had an affair with who then commits suicide, and her long-suffering assistant, Francesca Lentin (Noémie Merlant).

My theory as to why the film has caused controversy is that Fields takes no sides in the telling. The discovery of my years is that when you refuse to take sides in a dispute that has little to do with you, you present a litmus test for those with perceived skin in the game unintended. I also believe this is the source of the confusion for viewers who came away thinking Lydia Tár is a real person rather than fictional character. Fields presents the story without condemning or praising her and Blanchette creates a complex portrayal that, due to the inconsistencies in her life, feels like a genuine person.

In terms of the ever present culture wars raging online, the anti-Woke crowd seem to love her incredible besting of identitarian moralism in a scene where she is guest lecturing a group of Juilliard conducting students.

A nervous student called Max announces that “as a Bipoc pangender person” he’s “not into” cis white male composers like Bach.

TÁR Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.

MAX I guess Edgar Varèse is okay... I mean I like Arcana anyway.

TÁR Then you must be aware that Varèse once famously stated that jazz was “a negro product exploited by the Jews.” That didn’t stop Gerry Goldsmith from ripping him off for his Planet of the Apes score.

Kind of a perfect insult, don’t you think? But you see the problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic epistemic dissident is, if Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on -- then so can yours. Someday Max, when you go out into the world and guest conduct before a major, or minor, orchestra, you may notice that the players have more than lightbulbs and music on their stands. They’ll also have been handed rating sheets. The purpose of which is to rate you. What kind of criteria would you hope they use to do this? Your score reading and stick technique, or something else?

Okay everyone. Using Max’s criteria, let us consider Max’s thing. In this case Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. Now, can we agree upon two pieces of observation: One, that Anna was born in Iceland? And two, that she is -- in a Waldorf teacher kind of way -- a super hot young woman? Show of hands.

Now let’s turn our gaze back to the piano bench up there and see if we can square how any of those things possibly relate to the person seated before us.

(Max heads for the exit) Where are you going?

MAX You’re a fucking bitch!

TÁR And you are a robot! Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media. If you want to dance the mask, you must service the composer. Sublimate yourself, your ego, and yes, your identity! You must in fact stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.

She’s on point with her takedown of the precious posture of the younger generation but the tensions accumulate because she is a bully in this scene and others and, while a brilliant conductor and musician, she’s also a creep. Can an artist with such technical skill and intellectual prowess be forgiven the peccadillos of power? She is never accused of rape or violence. She is accused of using her power to get some nookie and then discard the women she beds (while being married to the concertmaster, Sharon Goodnow played by Nina Hoss) by gaslighting them.

It’s one of those films that begs questions that the audience must grapple with and, in an environment where the stories give us all the answers, it stands out.

Now, Tár is being praised by one of cinema's outspoken authorities—the Marvel-hating Martin Scorsese. While presenting Best Picture to Tár at the New York Film Critics Circle awards, where Blanchett also took home Best Actress, Scorsese heaped praise on Todd Field's masterpiece as a spark of cinema's future before going on to explain what makes Tár such a great film.

“For so long now, so many of us see films that pretty much let us know where they’re going. I mean, they take us by the hand, and even if it’s disturbing at times, sort of comfort us along the way that it will be all OK by the end. Now this is insidious, as one can get lulled into this, and ultimately get used to it. Leading those of us who’ve experienced cinema in the past — as much more than that— to become despairing of the future of the art form, especially for younger generations. But that’s on dark days.

The clouds lifted when I experienced Todd’s film, ‘TÁR.’ What you’ve done, Todd, is that the very fabric of the movie you created doesn’t allow this. All the aspects of cinema and the film that you’ve used, attest to this. The shift in locations, for example, the shift in locations alone do what cinema does best, which is to reduce space and time to what they are, which is nothing.

You make it so that we exist in her head. We experience only through her perception. The world is her. Time, chronology and space, become the music that she lives by. And we don’t know where the film’s going. We just follow the character on her strange, upsetting road to her even stranger final destination. Now, what you’ve done, Todd, it’s a real high-wire act, as all of this is conveyed through a masterful mise-en-scène, as controlled, precise, dangerous, precipitous angles, and edges geometrically kind of chiseled into a wonderful 2:3:5 aspect ratio of frame compositions. The limits of the frame itself, and the provocation of measured long takes all reflecting the brutal architecture of her soul — ‘TÁR’’s soul.”

Unlike Scorsese I love my Marvel films. I loved Top Gun: Maverick and Avater: The Way of Water. Hell, I loved Gerard Butler in PLANE. I also loved ‌TÁR. How a film about the highly esoteric world of orchestra, filled with heady conversations about interpretation, orchestral hierarchy, and Mahler could be this gripping and unsettling is a miracle.